


keep the earth below my feet

by magdaliny



Series: to win back what you lost [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Explosive Ordnance Disposal, Gen, Laos, POV Outsider, Recovery, recovery and being angry about it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-10
Updated: 2016-04-10
Packaged: 2018-06-01 10:54:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6515308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magdaliny/pseuds/magdaliny
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Susanna knows the arm is gone the moment she hits the ground.  The leg, too, she's certain, but she's wrong about that; she'll walk with a hitch in her giddy-up for the rest of her life, but she'll keep it, what parts of it don't get buried in Xieng Khouang with the rest of her.  Sometimes, when kids ask and she doesn't feel like explaining the thing about the bombs, the thing about how she's a crazy person, least to everybody back home, she'll tell them it was a shark took her arm, and that chunk out of her hip.  It does look like a bite, really.  The bomb done bit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	keep the earth below my feet

**Author's Note:**

  * For [danceswchopstck](https://archiveofourown.org/users/danceswchopstck/gifts).



> [danceswchopstck](http://archiveofourown.org/users/danceswchopstck/) wanted to know more about Major Hadley from Chapter 3 of [_the world no longer drowned_](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6101473). I flailed! I squee'd! I said I didn't know when I was going to get to it!
> 
> Apparently I was lying.
> 
> All Lao words are translated in hypertext, and at the end of the work.

Say what you like about Mrs. Patty-Mae Caroline Hadley, but she didn't raise no fools.

Susanna knows the arm is gone the moment she hits the ground. The leg, too, she's certain, but she's wrong about that; she'll walk with a hitch in her giddy-up for the rest of her life, but she'll keep it, what parts of it don't get buried in Xieng Khouang with the rest of her. Sometimes, when kids ask and she doesn't feel like explaining the thing about the bombs, the thing about how she's a crazy person, least to everybody back home, she'll tell them it was a shark took her arm, and that chunk out of her hip. It does look like a bite, really. The bomb done bit.

 

* * *

 

Major Susanna Hadley is flying.

It takes less than two seconds, but it feels like a whole week of time, stretched like salt taffy in the sunshine. An effortless glide, swimming in the air. She sees her detector go soaring over her like it was launched out of a rocket, and she feels like laughing, she opens her mouth to laugh, raises her hand to point—and the back of her head strikes a clod of dried river mud, and she's down in her body, a lake of her own blood moving slick under her jacket. She knows the arm's gone above the elbow. She knows what it'll look like if she turns her head, so she doesn't look. She's seen it so many times before, when the body's big enough to shred instead of going to vapour, like some of the littlest kids: flesh gone over with God's egg beater, muscle and skin whipped up to fluffy points. Meringue with character. Who's hungry?

Shouts and squealing detectors, boots stomping around her, and behind all that she can hear somebody praying, somebody fussing. Susanna doesn't scream; she snaps like a dog.

“Cut it off!” she snarls. “Cut it off, cut the goddamn thing off!”

But Susanna doesn't know there's nothing to cut off. She's lucky, they'll tell her. She should feel very lucky. It took her whole shoulder but the shrapnel didn't get her lungs, just tore her up one side and down the other, sliding shallow. She doesn't feel lucky right now. She feels like she could light the whole world on fire. She's spitting mad.

“Khaw thoht, Nok,” Susanna says, softer, when Khampheng's head appears. “Don't tell me how bad it is, sugar, I know.”

“Fucking hell, Tooey, stop moving,” Khampheng says. “I will kill you myself, you _cow_.”

“Better do it quick,” Susanna says, and laughs.

The truck bounces like the devil's own handcart along the paddy roads. Susanna grits her teeth and wishes for something to bite on, because a scream's going to work its way out sooner or later, and she's going to crack her teeth trying to keep it in. She reckons she could have run to the hospital her own self and involved less bouncing in the whole procedure. It's Vatsana driving; cursing the sky and everything under in Avkavkawv, not Lao, which is how Susanna knows she's scared. Chanthadeth, riding shotgun, has a white-knuckle grip on the dash.

“Ay, Vatsana, koi sa bai dee,” Susanna says. “Just get me there in one piece, yeah?”

Vatsana drives faster.

Outside the open truck, over the thumping and the engine and the cursing, Susanna hears cow bells, men calling to each other in the fields, the quick “ha!” of a child as they rocket past. The sound of another MAG truck rises, peaks, dopplers away: women on their way to their own clearance site, clapping, singing _naa jim lim maen kawng thaa ngaam_! She hopes, superstitiously, that hers will be the only injury today. It's not often there's an accident, even less often two at a time. Please, God, she thinks desperately, please let me be the whipping boy, don't let them lose two workers today. We can't afford to lose anybody else. We're already behind because of the Vang property. Take me instead.

I don't need a miracle, but they do.

 

* * *

 

Khampheng puts something into Susanna's pocket as they load her onto the helicopter.

“I'll come back,” Susanna says. She has no idea if she says it in English or French or Lao, but Khampheng speaks all three, so it doesn't matter a whit. The drugs make everything wobbly and bright, make the rotor blades sound like the whole world's being chopped to pieces between them. That's how Susanna feels: chewed up and spit out.

“You had better,” Khampheng says, gripping Susanna's hand like she doesn't mean to let the medics take her up. “Laos owns your blood in more ways than one. If you don't, I will come to America and find you and drag you back, and I do not think America would survive both of us.”

“Sohk dee deuh,” Susanna says. She's fighting tears, which makes her angry, which makes them fall all the faster. Khampheng wipes her thumbs under Susanna's eyes so the WHO boys won't see. Us girls gotta stick together. Don't let the men see you break. “Khawp jai lai lai,” Susanna says. “La khawn, Nok, Jesus, I hate this. I'll come back. Khaw thoht.”

“Sohk dee, Tooey,” says Khampheng, and then she's gone.

Susanna cries buckets on the helicopter, and can't even bring herself to feel ashamed.

Later, in her pocket, she'll find a tiny Phra Pidta carved out of bone, the little buddha on his knees with his face in his hands. All the UXO workers seemed to carry one, unless they were Akha, but Susanna'd never picked up the habit, not being religious or even moderately superstitious, least until she got blown into the sky. She couldn't be—she'd go mad, wondering if she hadn't done this or that, whether Mrs. Keomany's little boy would still have his hands. Phra Pidta, Khampheng told Susanna once, wards off the evils associated with a dangerous job. Susanna'd taken to thinking of him as the patron saint of the bomb girls.

She strokes his little head with her thumb and thinks, _well, mister, your job's easier from here on out_.

 

* * *

 

Four surgeries happen, time melting like candle wax between them, and suddenly it's August.

August 19th, 2020, and here's Susanna limping through an American airport—but it's still 2563 in her head, 16 Bhadrapada, the rainy season, UXO work suspended until the floods pass. 2020, Jesus _wept_ , when did she get so old? Phones have gotten taller and slimmer while she's been away, like heroin chic is coming back into style in the tech world, and the price of mangoes has skyrocketed. Some crazy blight down wherever. Where do American mangoes come from? Susanna doesn't know. She doesn't care, almost, except she's never eaten one. All those years in Laos and she's never had a mango, and now suddenly she wants one like she wants to breathe, and they're seven bucks each like they're made of goddamn gold. She goes down to the store and buys three of them, just to be ornery, and when she gets them home she realizes she can't cut them open properly. You need two arms to dice a mango. Who knew?

She improvises.

She improvises a lot, those first few months, and refuses to wear the clunky piece of shit they fit her for, with the straps that cut into her tit—what's left of it—and chafes something awful. She's always had monkey toes, so she starts using them for everything: opening doors when her hand is full, lifting the toilet seat, picking things up off the floor so she doesn't have to crouch and lose her balance on the way back up.

Jessie, she of the bubblegum-pink hair and the culinary degree and the hairless goblin cat, who lived in the apartment while Susanna was digging up rice paddies on the other side of the globe, refuses to be shifted.

“You need a hand—literally—and no way am I finding cheaper rent anywhere else,” Jessie says. “You want to bring somebody over, whatevs, girlfriend, just buy me some Bose headphones and a tub of tiger ice cream, you'll never know I'm here.”

Susanna'd never say it, but she's grateful. Even if the Goblin does seem to have it in for her.

That's not to say it's easy, being in America. Well, that's the problem, isn't it? It's too easy. Her bed's too soft and her apartment's too warm. She's got reverse culture shock up to her ears, from the way everybody's flat rude, to the way they act around their kids, to the food—God, the food, the food's everywhere, and there's much salt in _everything_ and she'd never noticed before, not until she'd been away from burger joints for five years. She finds herself trawling the dinky international section of any grocery store she visits, stocking up on cheap American knock-offs of Vietnamese variations on Laotian food.

She misses Khampheng. She misses Vatsana. She misses drinking lao lao in the camp, laughing long into the night, rising to the smell of khao piak sen already cooking. She misses washing in the yard in her sarong, boys trying to sneak peeks over the fence—how you could tell the new girls by how surprised they were that Susanna's hair went darker when it was wet. She misses the sweet tok-tok-tok of the windchimes in the evenings. She even, in her darker moments, misses the danger, the adrenaline rush, the high that came after another successful detonation, the plume of pale dust scraping the sky.

Susanna doesn't know how she's going to manage it, the way she limps like a drunk and barely makes ends meet on her pension, but by God, she's going to get back someday.

 

* * *

 

Running errands shouldn't mean running a gauntlet, but that's what it turns into, and it's almost enough to make Susanna pay Jessie to get groceries for the both of them.

It's worse than ever. Susanna should be used to the boggling—it started in school, on account of Susanna's daddy being half Hmong through his momma's side, and Susanna got handed down his broad, flat face and his dark eyes and what must have been his momma's cheekbones, because her own momma doesn't have any to speak of. The kids called her the Indian Princess. Forget that Susanna hasn't got a drop of First Nations in her blood, forget that she was blonder than most of them. It was those goddamn cheekbones. It was stares like those that drove her to get the hell out of Dodge in the first place.

When she came home in her service uniform, about a million years ago, she got stared down in the airport like she'd run off the plane in pasties and a bunny tail. That leave got cut awful short. It was a different kind of stare accounted for why she left again—why she asked to be assigned to bomb disposal, after one too many cases of Boys Will Be Boys in the barracks ended with a hush-up discharge for Sergeant Amy Booth and a promotion for the assholes who'd turned Amy into glass. The stares that sent her to Laos, where a little of her blood ran under the earth and the only looks she got were along the lines of _what the hell's that farang doing with the UXO girls?_ Which, really, was an improvement. At least UXO girls didn't have to take shit from nobody, no-how. UXO girls didn't have to prove nothing. UXO girls got _respect_.

But now, it's stares in the produce section, stares in the freezer aisle, stares over the deli counter, but nobody asks, and mommas bustle over to hush up their kids if they get curious. Like losing a limb's somehow catching. Yeah, you better run, Belle Pinker! You might get the gangrene somewhere nasty if you keep looking this way!

Susanna ignores the hell out of the whole white-bellied lot of them, and smiles like a genuine lady when she catches anybody giving her the hairy eyeball.

Patty-Mae swore up and down that Susanna got her fire from the Holliday blood, and her sweetness from the Hadley side of things, but the latter wasn't so much a compliment as a curse. When Susanna was too polite, it was “damn your father!” and when she was mad as a badger: “That's the spirit!” Patty-Mae had an obsession with genealogy that didn't quite jive with the real family history. “Doc's here,” Momma used to say; “Doc's watching over you, honey.” As if John Henry Holliday hadn't been a proper Southern gentleman down to his bones—as if he'd had any descendents to watch over anyway. As if he'd care about a quarter-Lao kid with anger issues.

Susanna's not sure if her momma'd be proud or disappointed, the way she's acting now, all her lumps on display and her nose in the air, pretending it doesn't burn like acid every time some bastard turns his pitying eyes on her like she's a poor broken china doll. Maybe, Susanna comes to reckon, it wasn't the heart attack that sent her daddy to an early grave. Maybe it was the stares. She's not planning on sticking around long enough to find out.

She finds herself obsessively checking airfare to Laos and running on camp time.

They run on girl hours, in Xieng Khouang, and she'll do anything to go home.

 

* * *

 

It's Jessie who tells her about StarkLimbs.

“And, see, there's a thing, the Joseph Rogers Foundation, and it pays for the prosthetics,” Jessie says, and Susanna steals the sweaty pamphlet before Jessie can twist it to pieces. “I know you said you didn't want any stuff, but I was in the VA with Beth on account of how her cousin's been doing therapy there, and I saw this on the brochure counter, and I thought, y'know.”

“Joseph Rogers,” Susanna reads. She flips it open. “As in—okay, yeah, apparently as in Steve Rogers's dad. Why the hell's Captain America funding a prosthetic charity?”

“I dunno, I think he lives with Mr. Stark?” Jessie hazards. “Also, he's a millionaire because death and taxes, at least, that's what Beth's cousin says, and maybe he's got military friends he wants to help? Anyway, it says anyone can apply, so...what've you got to lose?”

 _Oh, just my pride_ , Susanna thinks, but that's her momma talking nonsense from beyond the grave, and Susanna's a lot of things, but she's no quitter.

It takes a boatload of paperwork and a few long-distance phone calls, but to her surprise (and Jessie's complete and vocal lack of surprise), she gets approved within a few weeks. On an absolutely frigid January morning, drinking her coffee bo ahn pan lai, brewed through cloth with condensed milk, sweeter than sin, she waits for a Stark Industries technician to appear in her Skype window.

She's not sure what she's expecting, but she's pretty sure it's not this.

Jim Bauer has a Noo Yawk accent thick enough to cut with a knife, for a start. Susanna's met ancient Italian men from Brooklyn who drop less G's and R's than her new prosthetist. That's what he calls himself: a prosthetist. He looks about twenty, at first, and then she blinks, and all of a sudden he's edging forty. Susanna's accustomed to seeing that kind of uncanny-valley agelessness on Lao women of a certain disposition, but on a white boy from the Eastern Seaboard, it's just weird. To top it all off, he calls her Major, apparently without any sort of irony whatsoever, and when she insists on informality, he goes for ma'am instead.

Must have been raised by his grandpappy.

He's nice, though, Jim—cheerful and easy-going as he tells her about the Foundation and StarkLimbs and how he'll design her arm. He asks her to change into a tank top and sit at various angles to the webcam so his AI (what?) can take visual scans and build a model for him to work on. He tells her he'll be working with a neurosurgeon to design the port that'll be installed into what's left of her shoulder—

And then he rolls up his sleeve and _takes his left arm off_.

Susanna hadn't been aware, until this very moment, that Jim was an amputee. She couldn't tell. She _couldn't tell_. Ten feet away, banished to the back of her closet, is the godawfullest clunky piece of plastic shit she'd never wear again if you paid her, and here's Jim, wearing a piece of tech so good she'd never have known it was a prosthetic. She's sure her jaw is on the goddamn floor. She's sure she doesn't care.

He's showing her the ports in his stump, how the bits in the arm fit into the bits in the stump like headphone jacks, when up rolls what looks like a manufacturing robot from a car factory. It grabs Jim's stump in its claws and tugs. Susanna's a little—okay, a lot alarmed.

“He's real protective about open ports,” Jim says, like that explains anything, and then he says, “Hey, dummy, scram. This nice lady's gonna let me build her an arm.”

Gonna let me build her an arm.

Like Susanna hadn't been about to get down on her hands and knees and _beg_.

 

* * *

 

Susanna's making a double batch of scrambled eggs and bacon for her and Jessie and the Goblin when Jessie yelps “Jesus Christ McGod!” in the parlour. Jessie doesn't swear for anything less than imminent nuclear apocalypse, so Susanna's skidding into the room before she can think twice, still holding the bacon tongs. She almost falls on her ass, even before Jessie points at the television and says, “Isn't that your prosthetist?”

“My real identity is, um—well known,” the man on the screen says.

“They're saying he's the Winter Soldier,” Jessie whispers, like the huge ticker-tape at the bottom of the screen isn't proclaiming exactly that.

“Ssh!” Susanna hisses.

“My name,” says Jim Bauer, “Is James Buchanan Barnes.”

Jessie faints.

“Mow?” goes the Goblin.

“Son of a bitch,” Susanna says, and starts to laugh.

 

* * *

 

They're both shocked when the email comes in. Jessie was sort of gleefully worried that the Winter Soldier was going to come hunt down all the recipients of his limbs, and Susanna was just dead-certain old Jim Bauer would give up his cover and go back to being Sergeant Barnes. So long, beautiful prosthetic arm. It was nice knowing you.

But there it is, in plain English, asking if it was possible for Major Hadley to come to New York for the port installation surgery—air fare and accommodation, of course, being compensated by the Joseph Rogers Foundation.

“What are you _waiting_ for, girlfriend?” Jessie screams, when Susanna doesn't react for about five nanoseconds. “Pack your lucky panties, you're going to _New York_!”

Susanna doesn't have lucky panties, but she does have Phra Pidta. She's doubtful that little buddhas look after mixed-race military brats from the good ol' U S of A, but she slips him into her pocket all the same. If nothing else, he makes her think of Khampheng, who's stronger than anyone she's ever met by a factor of twelve, and who, Susanna knows, wouldn't be the least bit intimidated about flying to Stark Tower to meet a real live Howling Commando. Khampheng: patron saint of mouthy bomb girls. It'll have to do.

It works, until Susanna's escorted into the lab by a helpful robot, whereupon she's faced with Tony Stark holding a jet pack, Sergeant Barnes poking around inside his own arm, and _oh-dear-sweet-baby-Jesus_ the Falcon with his shirt off.

The Falcon promptly covers his nipples. He tries to make it casual by crossing his arms, but he misses it by about a country mile.

 _Dear Jessie_ , Susanna thinks, _You'll never believe what happened to me today..._

“Oh,” says Tony Stark, popping the wings open and holding them in front of Major Wilson like he's doing anybody any favors. “You're early. She's early, Bucko, I'm allergic to punctual people, take her to the aux lab before I develop shingles.”

“Shingles ain't an allergic reaction,” says Sergeant Barnes. He walks right up to Susanna and offers his left hand, which endears him to her instantly, as does sassing Tony Stark. And—is that a _ring_? “Major Hadley. It's a pleasure to finally meet you, ma'am.”

“Likewise, Sergeant Barnes,” Susanna says. “I hear tell you've got a scalpel with my name on it.”

“Bucky, please,” he says, and, “Sure do. Doc wants to meet you, but she won't be back for an hour. Want some coffee?”

Susanna startles at "Doc"—Jesus, Momma, why'd you have to be so right and yet so wrong about everything?—and startles again at being invited for coffee by a national hero. She follows him all the same.

 _Coffee_ is apparently code for _hang out in the suite where I live with Captain America_ , but after ten minutes of feeling like the awkwardest duckling in the pond, Susanna learns that Bucky Barnes is the world's biggest nerd, and he has exactly zero chill. Neither do his dogs, one of which is frankly desperate to worship at the Altar of Susanna, and the other of which skitters around like a crack-happy antelope until Bucky practically sits on her. When she catches him sidelong, he looks tired, but not the tired-unto-death he was rocking at the press conference, which is a relief, considering he'll be one of the people with their hands in her squishy bits tomorrow morning.

And, five minutes later, she gets to see him in a moment of pure, unguarded, childlike joy, when Captain America walks into the room with green paint smeared across the bridge of his nose. She glances at his left hand and thinks: _oh_. If that don't beat all.

“Oh, hey!” Captain Rogers says, bright as sunshine. “You must be Major Hadley. Buck's been real excited about your visit.”

“It's an honor, Sir,” Susanna says.

Captain Rogers—Steve, she realizes, he's going to ask her to call him Steve—makes a surprisingly rude noise.

“I'm retired, covered in turpentine, and not wearing shoes,” he says. “Steve's close enough for jazz. Lemme get changed, I'll rustle up some nachos.”

This is her life now, apparently.

Got any big plans for after?” Bucky asks later, over nachos and spinach salad and coffee made on a stove the old-fashioned way. It's not nearly sweet enough, but it's practically scraped out of a tar pit, and halfway's better than nothing at all.

“Yeah,” Susanna says. “I'm going back to Laos.”

“Laos,” Steve says, frowning. “That's the place you lost your arm?”

Susanna shrugs. “Well, Nana's from there, and I sure don't belong in Georgia. But what can I say? Land's staked a claim on me.” She looks at Bucky. “You get that, I bet.”

“I'd never go back,” Bucky says quietly, “But—yeah. Yeah. Some places leave a mark on you. Some take their pound of flesh.”

He's not talking about her arm.

“Yeah,” Susanna whispers.

Being understood shouldn't hurt so goddamn much.

 

* * *

 

“Ready?” Doc Traoré asks.

“Ready,” says Susanna.

 _I'm coming, Khampheng_ , Susanna thinks, and follows Phra Pidta into the dark.

 

* * *

 

Laos in the morning always smells the same. Coffee, the almost popcorn-like odor of cooking rice, cardamom over everything like it's harvested out of the air. This morning, it's spiked with the aroma of fresh elephant dung. Some early riser is frying mulberry leaves in the village.

The camp is still asleep. Susanna creeps in barefoot, the way she used to sneak to the toilet in the middle of the night, quiet as a snake. She deer-sproings over sleeping bags until she finds Khampheng, and sits on her.

“Tooey!” Khampheng screams, and that's the camp woken up for the day, girls coming in shrieking from all the adjoining rooms, petting her hair, touching her shining arm, laughing. Susanna tries to hug all of them at once. Someone comes in to yell at them, but nobody listens. She's come home.

She's come home.

 

* * *

 

The next rainy season, on what will end up being the wettest day of the year—of the past three years, according to Khampheng—a truck arrives in the camp just after dawn. Two men of uncertain ancestry unload anonymous metal box after anonymous metal box. The shorter one finds Susanna under the dripping porch and gives her an invoice, and then they speed away.

“What the fuck was that?” Khampheng asks, staring down the drive, hands on her hips.

“I don't know,” Susanna says, and opens the envelope to find an honest-to-God telegram.

BETTER DETECTORS AND SOLAR POWERED DRONES FOR YOUR CONVENIENCE STOP DON'T THANK ME IT GIVES ME HIVES STOP ACTUALLY THANK ME BY NOT LOSING YOUR OTHER ARM STOP TS

“Hey, Nok?” Susanna says. “What kind of gift do you get for someone who has everything?”

“Something really stupid,” says Khampheng.

“Does that guy who carves naughty Buddha statues still live over in Muang Khoun?”

“I think so. Why?”

“Absolutely no reason at all,” says Susanna, and goes inside to wake the bomb girls.

**Author's Note:**

> There's about eighteen different ways to transliterate Lao, and I've tried to be as consistent as I could, but I'm sure I've made some errors. If anybody knows better, please don't hesitate to twist my ear.
> 
> MAG is the [Mines Advisory Group](http://www.maginternational.org/). UXO stands for Unexploded Ordinance. WHO is the World Health Organization.
> 
> Lao nicknames can be sweet -- Nok, Khampheng's nickname, means bird -- but often they're unflattering, the belief being that they'll ward off evil spirits. Susanna's nickname is Tooey, which means Fatty, but you'd generally only give it to a skinny person, like calling a big guy Tiny.
> 
> Khaw thoht: I'm sorry.  
> Koi sa bai dee: I'm okay.  
> Naa jim lim maen kawng thaa ngaam: those beautiful creatures are deer with bright eyes. From _Seong Kho Fon_ \-- the Rain Request Song. You can listen to Dr. Wajuppa Tossa sing it [here](http://www.mamalisa.com/mp3/rain_request_song_lao.mp3) (link autoplays).  
>  Sohk dee deuh: goodbye; take care.  
> Khawp jai lai lai: thank you so much.  
> La khawn: goodbye.  
> Lao lao: Laotian rice whiskey.  
> Khao piak sen: a rice noodle soup commonly eaten for breakfast. It's comfort food.  
> Falang: foreigner, westerner. Susanna's a quarter Lao, but it doesn't show much.  
> Bo ahn pan lai: very sweet, thick coffee made with condensed milk.
> 
> A [naughty Buddha statue](https://kafirgirl.wordpress.com/2008/11/08/buddhas-secret/) (OMG NSFW). The linked Buddha is from Pakistan, but I've seen Southeast Asian ones -- my old boss's husband used to collect them. *knowledge rainbow hands*
> 
> Thanks for reading! You can find me on Tumblr [here](http://magdaliny.tumblr.com) or [here](http://redstarwhitestar.tumblr.com).


End file.
